Filling the Well

Back from Albuquerque.  Had a near death experience, which I’ll tell the story of soon.  Meanwhile, I wanted to brag about this:

In case you can’t quite see it, my car turned over 200,000 miles this trip.  The best part?  I still get 35-40 mpg.  Love my car…

On this roadtrip:

• I was reminded how flat the flat bits of Nebraska are.
• I learned that the restrooms at Nebraska rest stops are air conditioned. Score!
• I hit and killed a robin. This upset me greatly because I like birds. They usually get out of the way, but this one zigged when it should have zagged. Sigh.

Saw Hellboy II last night after getting back home. I liked great big swathes of it, mostly in the first half. It’s like old school urban fantasy, with elves and cities and magic and troll markets and cool stuff. But the second half kind of fell apart, mostly because the characters kept acting stupid. I got annoyed. Daniel has a good, writerly analysis of the problem.

But old school urban fantasy? More, please.

I picked the hottest day yet this summer to drive across Nebraska.  Sigh.

I’m entering a month of being intensely busy, so if posting becomes spotty, that’s why.

First up, this weekend I’ll be at OSFest in Omaha, Nebraska. I’ve got a reading and a panel on Saturday. If you’re in the area, consider dropping by!

I have a day at home before heading to Albuquerque to hang with some writer friends and plot the takeover of the universe. Or somebody’s universe, at least.

The weekend after that, more camping. The weekend after that, Las Vegas (purely for fun — woot!). The weekend after that is Worldcon. Poor Lily is not going to like all this disruption to her routine.

And I’m trying to finish a novel in the middle of all this. Yikes!

I returned home to find all the previously bare trees have leaves on them. It’s like instant summer.

More about the trip after I’ve had a chance to unwind and eat something. Difficult when I left all the cupboards bare. Hmmm….pizza delivery anyone?

No hiking today, I think. Here’s the view outside my window this morning:

Not quite what I expected. Weather report for tomorrow says mostly sunny, in which case this will all look beautiful. The other possibility is this keeps up for two days and I get snowed in.

So why am I here? I’m at the Rio Hondo writers workshop, which I like to think of as summer camp for grown up writer types. There are ten of us here, critiquing stories and eating yummy food because we have some very talented cooks serving up really splendid meals. I’m not a talented cook, but I’m a pretty good dish washer. We all have our contributions.

I was hoping to go hiking again today. But it might be a day for playing snow monkey in the hot tub…

This is from a hike near Taos Ski Valley.

I’m on the road again, traveling in New Mexico, so posting will be spotty this week. But the scenery here is so beautiful I may have to post some pictures.

I leave you with a couple of thoughts:

Battlestar Galactica is dead to me. I’ve written about how to write a good series. BSG is doing a really good job right now demonstrating how to screw up a series. More later, I’m waiting to see how they wrap it all up.

Yes, I’m still following all the GI Joe movie rumors and character photos. I must say, I heart Dennis Quaid’s Hawk, and the Baroness looks pretty darned good (this version looks a lot like the excellent artwork of Mike Bear in the current run of comics). But it’s all looking very dark and Matrix-y, which is confusing my 1980’s cartoon lovin’ sensibilities.

I got a few weird reactions when I told people I’d be spending a week in Belize. It’s like the country has two separate reputations. First: tropical paradise famous for scuba diving, fishing, birdwatching, eco-tourism, etc. Second: another one of those dangerous third world Latin American countries where people get kidnapped. Some people asked, grimacing, “Why are you going there?”

Er, yeah. Okay. I wasn’t really aware of the second reputation. I think it speaks to a bad attitude about travel in general. I concentrated on the scuba diving. I started the PADI certification process at a dive shop in Boulder and went to Belize to complete the open water dives in a place a lot more interesting than Carter Lake. Because the water in Carter Lake is cold. The water in Belize? Constant 80 degrees F. Oh yeah.

This turned out to be a great way to finish the certification because I was doing actual real diving right out of the gate, instead of trundling into the water, fulfilling a few requirements, then trundling out again, shivering like a wet cat. I trundled into the water for the very first time, saw a school of seven 6-foot long nurse sharks circling under me, fulfilled a few requirements, then swam around for another 30 minutes. I already have my best diving story for the rest of my life. (Who sees a school of nurse sharks on their very first dive?) Oh, the sharks were very very cool, not at all scary. Nurse sharks are slow bottom feeders, and these weren’t interested in me at all. They were circling, swimming very slowly and gracefully. I could have watched them for hours.

I’ve been going to big aquariums my whole life, all the really good ones: Monterey, Baltimore, Georgia. I’d stand in front of the huge coral reef tanks with the dozens of multicolored fish, thinking it can’t possibly be like this in real life. In the wild I wouldn’t see all these different fish together, and there wouldn’t be so many.

It turns out, actually, I would. In fact, I’d see more. And bigger. Foot long parrot fish. Angelfish as big as pizzas. Schools and schools of tang, damsel fish, parrot fish, butterfly fish, all swimming together, and coral reef in all directions, as far as I could see. Snapper swimming above, groupers lurking below. Occasional sharks, morays, lobsters, crabs, puffers, triggerfish, barracuda. I’d sit in a current and just drift past the reef, seeing fish the whole time. And the old timers kept talking about how there weren’t as many fish as there used to be.

I did 10 dives all week, including a night dive, and feel like I’m a much more solid diver than I would have been if I had done the certification without the trip.

I went on the Blue Hole trip, but I didn’t dive the Blue Hole because 120 ft sounded just a little too scary for a brand-new diver like me. I snorkeled the edges instead, and it was awesome. Here, the reef is close to the surface and the sunlight brought out all the colors. The Blue Hole is a collapsed limestone cavern about sixty miles off the coast. It’s over 400 ft deep and seems bottomless. Mainly, I loved being out on the water in the atolls, which are oases of calm, turquoise water in the middle of rough seas.

Here’s me diving. Cool, huh?

I stayed in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, which is apparently the island Madonna was singing about in “La Isla Bonita.” (I just watched the video. That’s not the Belize San Pedro.) There’s a cool mix of cultures here: Ambergris felt Caribbean, but there’s a strong Latin American influence — lots of Spanish spoken on the streets, a lot of Mayan heritage, and the country was a British colony until 1981 and English is the official language. You’ll hear people speaking Spanish, Creole, and English, everywhere. I’ve been to towns on Caribbean islands that isolated the tourists — in cruise ship ports, the passengers all get funneled to one or two streets with all the shopping. Two blocks away are all the local shops and local shoppers, with no tourists in sight. It’s not like that in San Pedro. Everything is all together. Locals sit on the beach smoking cigarettes right next to the hotel, and the local grocery store is right next to the tourist t-shirt/gift shop. At the hotel, the bartender would ask me where I had dinner and we’d trade opinions on the local restaurants.

Also: Pirates stayed here in the seventeenth century. Arrrrrrr! I have a pirate book I want to write.

Favorite Meal: Conch chowder and a margarita at Elvi’s.

Best Wildlife Moment: Three spotted eagle rays, huge, swimming in formation about twenty feet below me, along a coral wall at Turneffe Atoll. Oh, and the hawksbill turtles were awesome. Oh, then there was the red-footed booby sanctuary on Half Moon Caye, where the male magnificent frigatebirds were in full red balloon display… You get the idea.

The pier at Half Moon Caye. I have a lot of photos of palm trees, white beaches, blue sky, and impossibly blue water.

I also made a trip into the mainland to visit the Mayan ruins at Xunantunich, near the Guatemalan border. Very impressive, well-cared for ruins. And no crowds. My group almost had the place to ourselves.

This is El Castillo, the main temple at Xunantunich:

I have a lot of photos, a lot of stories. But the bottom line is I had exactly the trip I wanted: I relaxed, I saw a good slice of a country I’d never been too, I became a certified diver in probably the coolest way possible, and I returned home energized and ready to get back to work.

Life is good.

I’m back. It’ll be a couple of days before I un-discombobulate myself enough to write a longer post (and answer 200 or so emails…)

The short version: I had a really great time. I’m told I’m so tan my skin is darker than my hair. And that’s saying something.